His Woman

Veteran Sloman's long career was winding down in 1931, but he shows a steady hand in this cliché tale of a stern but naive young sea captain (Cooper) who falls for the "entertainer" (Colbert) who, desperate to escape from a South American port, bluffs her way on board as nurse for a foundling baby dumped in the ship's dinghy. Romance takes second place, however, to scenes stolen by the engagingly vivacious and good-natured baby (Richard Spiro), and by the ship's African-American servants, played in Amos and Andy-style cross-talk by Hamtree Harrington and Sidney Easton. (Journeyman director of photography William O. Steiner went on to light a number of films featuring African American entertainers.) HIS WOMAN is a respectable B movie, worth seeing for the almost exaggeratedly tall young Cooper and the detail of Colbert's tramp friends, who lounge around their shared apartment in pre-Production Code undress. Colbert's first appearance, arriving by boat at night in search of a nightclub job, and some byplay in the cantina between Cooper and dancer Raquel Davidovich, who tempts him by kissing a flower, both recall Marlene Dietrich and Cooper in the previous year's MOROCCO, suggesting Paramount may have hoped to trade on that film's success.

His Woman is a story of lonely tramp freighter captain Gary Cooper who while in port in Asia has a white baby abandoned on the rowboat he uses to get to and from his freighter with a note by a despondent mother. Gary takes to the little guy, but he knows full well he'll need a woman's touch in tending to him. And not just any woman.

His order to dive owner Douglass Dumbrille, send me over a woman, but a nice woman, not some of those who frequent your establishment. Claudette Colbert seems to fill the bill. But she's been around the track a few times though Cooper doesn't know it.

When first mate Averill Harris who's seen her in waterfront dives before makes advances on her, Cooper eventually finds out though.

His Woman is the kind of Victorian melodrama that might have been popular on the stage 35 years before. Studios were still digging up these old plots as vehicles for their films. Cooper comes across as stupidly naive. I mean this is a sailing man, a man of the world, who did he think he was going to find in the places he hangs out, Florence Nightingale.

And Colbert comes across too much as a lady. Someone like Joan Crawford would have been perfect for the part, but Colbert never quite convinces as a waterfront denizen.

The film was shot on the East Coast and in Paramount's Astoria Studio in New York after Cooper was on extended holiday in Europe and on safari in Africa. According to the Citadel film series book, The Films of Gary Cooper it hadn't been shown on television ever because of the two Amos and Andy like black characters who were ship stewards on Gary's freighter. This was back in the Sixties, because apparently it's been seen by a couple of people to write reviews about it.

The two stewards, played by a comedy team of Hamtree Harrington and Sidney Easton, were a bit much and they would indeed be found offensive by a lot of people today.

So with Hamtree and Sidney and the fact it's a dated melodrama from the Victorian age does not bode well for His Woman.

Well, this was an unexpectedly entertaining and thoughtful film. Don't look up the story first or you'll not feel the jolts of the clever and quite unpredictable twists. For 1932, this is a lot more realistic than was common then giving us a perfect reflection of that age. This has easily as much seedy grime as anything they were doing at Warners.

Gary Cooper is uncharacteristically lively in this. Not sure his management style which ranges from negotiation by fists to smashing a glass bottle into a guy's botty with a crowbar would be that acceptable now though. Not sure his sexist arrogance: the purpose of a man is to work, the purpose of a woman is to bring up a man's child, would make him particularly endearing either but under that alpha-male macho man there's a kind hearted ...gorilla below. Gary Cooper can sometimes be so lugubrious that he can send you to sleep but under the dynamic direction of Edward Sloman (no, never heard of him either) Cooper is like an erupting volcano of testosterone.

He steals every scene including those with the divine Miss Colbert - and that's coming from her biggest fan! It's not just Mr Cooper or Miss Colbert who give excellent, realistic and natural performances, all of Mr Sloman's actors seem like real people with real and authentic personalities. If this is representative of Edward Sloman's work then the guy should be more well known. He doesn't just make his characters come to life, he makes what you're looking at become reality. You can smell the stench of the filthy streets of the port, you almost have a sense of danger yourself.

Two familiar 1930s themes are tackled here. The somewhat sexist title itself: HIS WOMAN is purposely controversial. OK, we're a hundred years ago so don't expect equality but questioning Cooper's Captain Sam's misogynistic attitudes are central to this picture. The other trope is snobbery - in this case taken to the extreme. When Claudette Colbert first meets Gary Cooper she makes him believe that she's the daughter of a missionary and that's fine and dandy. When however he discovers that she's worked in a brothel then that's too much for this fine, upstanding, morally righteous Christian...and frequenter himself of brothels. It's interesting to wonder what inner conflicts are going on in his mind, to wonder how he can justify what he believes or to wonder whether he's just an idiot.

The focal point of the whole picture centres on a crewman trying to rape Colbert's Sally having discovered her occupation. The question - as utterly ludicrous as it seems to us now is: is it ok to rape a young woman if she had once worked as a prostitute? Bizarrely the consensus seems at the time to be a definite yes! There's not even any suggestion that the crewmen was out of order - she was the guilty one! The 1930s wasn't just another time, it was another world!

All this commentary makes this sound like it's a very deep and heavy film but nothing could be further from the truth. Edward Sloman's manages to set off all these little explosions in your brain whilst still maintaining an almost upbeat light-hearted mood.

A ship's captain discovers an abandoned baby and hires a dance hall girl, posing as a missionary's daughter, to be the child's nanny on a voyage from the Caribbean to New York.

Pre-code film with good performances from Gary Cooper as the captain and Claudette Colbert as the girl. The story is somewhat improbable but that does not detract from enjoyment of the film.

Shortly after the story begins, someone abandons a baby aboard a freighter with a note attached to him. It says that the baby belongs to someone aboard the ship and she was leaving it forever. The Captain (Gary Cooper) at first wants to drop the baby off ashore but soon decides to keep the cute little guy. But he cannot run the ship AND care for a baby at the same time, so he looks for a woman to help with raising the kid. Soon he finds Sally (Claudette Colbert) and she feeds him a line about being the daughter of a recently deceased missionary...when she actually is a bit of a tramp. Despite this, she turns out to be a good foster mother and things seem to be going just fine. However, a crew member recognizes Sally and thinks that because she's had a past that it entitles him to attack her! But the Captain hears the commotion and comes to Sally's defense. In the ensuing scuffle, the evil crew member is knocked off the ship and presumed lost. But this isn't the end to all this....and what happens next, well, you'll just have to see it for yourself.

I really enjoyed this film, though I am sure some might object to it being a bit schmaltzy. What I liked most is that the story attacked the old so-called 'double-standard'...where men are supposed to be 'experienced' and that women, if they have similar experiences, are tramps! I appreciated the message and enjoyed seeing where the film went. Very unusual and worth seeing.